“Yes — uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable! But it was part of my stupid pride, when the thing began, not to admit that I could be disturbed by the trifling5 matter of seeing two —
“And then I’d no reason, really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I knew I was simply bored — horribly bored. But it was part of my boredom6 — I remember — that I was feeling so uncommonly7 well, and didn’t know how on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come back from a long journey — down in South America and Mexico — and had settled down for the winter near New York, with an old aunt who had known Washington Irving and corresponded with N. P. Willis. She lived, not far from Irvington, in a damp Gothic villa8, overhung by Norway spruces, and looking exactly like a memorial emblem9 done in hair. Her personal appearance was in keeping with this image, and her own hair — of which there was little left — might have been sacrificed to the manufacture of the emblem.
“I had just reached the end of an agitated10 year, with considerable arrears11 to make up in money and emotion; and theoretically it seemed as though my aunt’s mild hospitality would be as beneficial to my nerves as to my purse. But the deuce of it was that as soon as I felt myself safe and sheltered my energy began to revive; and how was I to work it off inside of a memorial emblem? I had, at that time, the agreeable illusion that sustained intellectual effort could engage a man’s whole activity; and I decided12 to write a great book — I forget about what. My aunt, impressed by my plan, gave up to me her Gothic library, filled with classics in black cloth and daguerrotypes of faded celebrities13; and I sat down at my desk to make myself a place among their number. And to facilitate my task she lent me a cousin to copy my manuscript.
“The cousin was a nice girl, and I had an idea that a nice girl was just what I needed to restore my faith in human nature, and principally in myself. She was neither beautiful nor intelligent — poor Alice Nowell! — but it interested me to see any woman content to be so uninteresting, and I wanted to find out the secret of her content. In doing this I handled it rather rashly, and put it out of joint14 — oh, just for a moment! There’s no fatuity15 in telling you this, for the poor girl had never seen any one but cousins . . .
“Well, I was sorry for what I’d done, of course, and confoundedly bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down to the library to fetch a book she’d mislaid, like any artless heroine on the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered16, and it suddenly occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly thick and pretty, would look exactly like my aunt’s when she grew older. I was glad I had noticed this, for it made it easier for me to do what was right; and when I had found the book she hadn’t lost I told her I was leaving for Europe that week.
“Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once what I meant. She didn’t take it in the least as I’d expected — it would have been easier if she had. She held her book very tight, and turned away a moment to wind up the lamp on my desk — it had a ground glass shade with vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I remember. Then she came back, held out her hand, and said: ‘Good-bye.’ And as she said it she looked straight at me and kissed me. I had never felt anything as fresh and shy and brave as her kiss. It was worse than any reproach, and it made me ashamed to deserve a reproach from her. I said to myself: ‘I’ll marry her, and when my aunt dies she’ll leave us this house, and I’ll sit here at the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over there with her embroidery17 and look at me as she’s looking now. And life will go on like that for any number of years.’ The prospect18 frightened me a little, but at the time it didn’t frighten me as much as doing anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on my finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with me.
“You’ll wonder why I’m enlarging on this familiar incident. It’s because the evening on which it took place was the very evening on which I first saw the queer sight I’ve spoken of. Being at that time an ardent19 believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect I naturally tried to trace some kind of link between what had just happened to me in my aunt’s library, and what was to happen a few hours later on the same night; and so the coincidence between the two events always remained in my mind.
“I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under the weight of the first good action I had ever consciously committed; and young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation. Don’t imagine from this that I had hitherto been an instrument of destruction. I had been merely a harmless young man, who had followed his bent20 and declined all collaboration21 with Providence22. Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote the moral order of the world, and I felt a good deal like the trustful spectator who has given his gold watch to the conjurer, and doesn’t know in what shape he’ll get it back when the trick is over . . . Still, a glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I undressed that when I’d got used to being good it probably wouldn’t make me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in bed, and had blown out my candle, I felt that I really was getting used to it, and that, as far as I’d got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of my aunt’s very softest wool mattresses23.
“I closed my eyes on this image, and when I opened them it must have been a good deal later, for my room had grown cold, and the night was intensely still. I was waked suddenly by the feeling we all know — the feeling that there was something near me that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness. The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague glimmer24 at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me. I couldn’t see the face attached to them — on account of the darkness, I imagined — but as I looked the eyes grew more and more distinct: they gave out a light of their own.
“The sensation of being thus gazed at was far from pleasant, and you might suppose that my first impulse would have been to jump out of bed and hurl25 myself on the invisible figure attached to the eyes. But it wasn’t — my impulse was simply to lie still . . . I can’t say whether this was due to an immediate26 sense of the uncanny nature of the apparition27 — to the certainty that if I did jump out of bed I should hurl myself on nothing — or merely to the benumbing effect of the eyes themselves. They were the very worst eyes I’ve ever seen: a man’s eyes — but what a man! My first thought was that he must be frightfully old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped28 a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked29 leer; and between these pulpy30 folds of flesh, with their scant31 bristle32 of lashes33, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim34 about the pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish.
“But the age of the eyes was not the most unpleasant thing about them. What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security. I don’t know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to belong to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside the danger lines. They were not the eyes of a coward, but of some one much too clever to take risks; and my gorge35 rose at their look of base astuteness36. Yet even that wasn’t the worst; for as we continued to scan each other I saw in them a tinge37 of faint derision, and felt myself to be its object.
“At that I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me out of bed and pitched me straight on the unseen figure at its foot. But of course there wasn’t any figure there, and my fists struck at emptiness. Ashamed and cold, I groped about for a match and lit the candles. The room looked just as usual — as I had known it would; and I crawled back to bed, and blew out the lights.
“As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now applied38 myself to explaining them on scientific principles. At first I thought the illusion might have been caused by the glow of the last embers in the chimney; but the fire-place was on the other side of my bed, and so placed that the fire could not possibly be reflected in my toilet glass, which was the only mirror in the room. Then it occurred to me that I might have been tricked by the reflection of the embers in some polished bit of wood or metal; and though I couldn’t discover any object of the sort in my line of vision, I got up again, groped my way to the hearth39, and covered what was left of the fire. But as soon as I was back in bed the eyes were back at its foot.
“They were an hallucination, then: that was plain. But the fact that they were not due to any external dupery didn’t make them a bit pleasanter to see. For if they were a projection40 of my inner consciousness, what the deuce was the matter with that organ? I had gone deeply enough into the mystery of morbid41 pathological states to picture the conditions under which an exploring mind might lay itself open to such a midnight admonition; but I couldn’t fit it to my present case. I had never felt more normal, mentally and physically42; and the only unusual fact in my situation — that of having assured the happiness of an amiable43 girl — did not seem of a kind to summon unclean spirits about my pillow. But there were the eyes still looking at me . . .
“I shut mine, and tried to evoke44 a vision of Alice Nowell’s. They were not remarkable45 eyes, but they were as wholesome46 as fresh water, and if she had had more imagination — or longer lashes — their expression might have been interesting. As it was, they did not prove very efficacious, and in a few moments I perceived that they had mysteriously changed into the eyes at the foot of the bed. It exasperated47 me more to feel these glaring at me through my shut lids than to see them, and I opened my eyes again and looked straight into their hateful stare . . .
“And so it went on all night. I can’t tell you what that night was, nor how long it lasted. Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide awake, and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened ’em you’d see something you dreaded49 and loathed50? It sounds easy, but it’s devilish hard. Those eyes hung there and drew me. I had the vertige de l’abime, and their red lids were the edge of my abyss. . . . I had known nervous hours before: hours when I’d felt the wind of danger in my neck; but never this kind of strain. It wasn’t that the eyes were so awful; they hadn’t the majesty51 of the powers of darkness. But they had — how shall I say? — a physical effect that was the equivalent of a bad smell: their look left a smear52 like a snail’s. And I didn’t see what business they had with me, anyhow — and I stared and stared, trying to find out . . .
“I don’t know what effect they were trying to produce; but the effect they did produce was that of making me pack my portmanteau and bolt to town early the next morning. I left a note for my aunt, explaining that I was ill and had gone to see my doctor; and as a matter of fact I did feel uncommonly ill — the night seemed to have pumped all the blood out of me. But when I reached town I didn’t go to the doctor’s. I went to a friend’s rooms, and threw myself on a bed, and slept for ten heavenly hours. When I woke it was the middle of the night, and I turned cold at the thought of what might be waiting for me. I sat up, shaking, and stared into the darkness; but there wasn’t a break in its blessed surface, and when I saw that the eyes were not there I dropped back into another long sleep.
“I had left no word for Alice when I fled, because I meant to go back the next morning. But the next morning I was too exhausted53 to stir. As the day went on the exhaustion54 increased, instead of wearing off like the lassitude left by an ordinary night of insomnia55: the effect of the eyes seemed to be cumulative56, and the thought of seeing them again grew intolerable. For two days I struggled with my dread48; but on the third evening I pulled myself together and decided to go back the next morning. I felt a good deal happier as soon as I’d decided, for I knew that my abrupt57 disappearance58, and the strangeness of my not writing, must have been very painful for poor Alice. That night I went to bed with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once; but in the middle of the night I woke, and there were the eyes . . .
“Well, I simply couldn’t face them; and instead of going back to my aunt’s I bundled a few things into a trunk and jumped onto the first steamer for England. I was so dead tired when I got on board that I crawled straight into my berth59, and slept most of the way over; and I can’t tell you the bliss60 it was to wake from those long stretches of dreamless sleep and look fearlessly into the darkness, knowing that I shouldn’t see the eyes . . .
“I stayed abroad for a year, and then I stayed for another; and during that time I never had a glimpse of them. That was enough reason for prolonging my stay if I’d been on a desert island. Another was, of course, that I had perfectly61 come to see, on the voyage over, the folly62, complete impossibility, of my marrying Alice Nowell. The fact that I had been so slow in making this discovery annoyed me, and made me want to avoid explanations. The bliss of escaping at one stroke from the eyes, and from this other embarrassment63, gave my freedom an extraordinary zest64; and the longer I savoured it the better I liked its taste.
“The eyes had burned such a hole in my consciousness that for a long time I went on puzzling over the nature of the apparition, and wondering nervously65 if it would ever come back. But as time passed I lost this dread, and retained only the precision of the image. Then that faded in its turn.
“The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I believe, to write another great book — a definitive66 work on Etruscan influences in Italian art. At any rate, I’d found some pretext67 of the kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza68 di Spagna and dabbling69 about indefinitely in the Forum70; and there, one morning, a charming youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light, slender and smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar — one to Antinous, say — but he’d come instead from New York, with a letter (of all people) from Alice Nowell. The letter — the first I’d had from her since our break — was simply a line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert Noyes, and appealing to me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that he ‘had talent,’ and ‘wanted to write’; and, an obdurate71 family having insisted that his calligraphy72 should take the form of double entry, Alice had intervened to win him six months’ respite73, during which he was to travel on a meagre pittance74, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint75 conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive76 as a mediaeval ‘ordeal.’ Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify77 myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment of my chance.
“Well, I imagine it’s safe to lay down the general principle that predestined geniuses don’t, as a rule, appear before one in the spring sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished78 gods. At any rate, poor Noyes wasn’t a predestined genius. But he was beautiful to see, and charming as a comrade too. It was only when he began to talk literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the symptoms so well — the things he had ‘in him,’ and the things outside him that impinged! There’s the real test, after all. It was always — punctually, inevitably79, with the inexorableness of a mechanical law — it was always the wrong thing that struck him. I grew to find a certain grim fascination80 in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he’d select; and I acquired an astonishing skill at the game . . .
“The worst of it was that his betise wasn’t of the too obvious sort. Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the microscope, fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent, something that he could make ‘do’ and be happy on; and wasn’t that, after all, what I was concerned with? He was so charming — he continued to be so charming — that he called forth81 all my charity in support of this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was a chance for him . . .
“Those months were delightful82. Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural grace — it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting83 the throat of some artless animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry84 — an instinctive85 ruse86 to get away from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn’t — dear lad! — believe in himself. There wasn’t a trace of hypocrisy87 in his composition. He was sure that his ‘call’ was irresistible88, while to me it was the saving grace of his situation that it wasn’t, and that a little money, a little leisure, a little pleasure would have turned him into an inoffensive idler. Unluckily, however, there was no hope of money, and with the grim alternative of the office desk before him he couldn’t postpone89 his attempt at literature. The stuff he turned out was deplorable, and I see now that I knew it from the first. Still, the absurdity90 of deciding a man’s whole future on a first trial seemed to justify me in withholding91 my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging him a little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth to flower.
“At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the point of getting his term of probation92 extended. When I left Rome he went with me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and Venice. I said to myself: ‘If he has anything in him, it will come out now; and it did. He was never more enchanting93 and enchanted94. There were moments of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring sound seemed actually to pass into his face — but only to issue forth in a shallow flood of the palest ink . . .
“Well the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no hand but mine to do it. We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to stay with me, not wanting him to be alone in his dismal95 pension when he had to face the necessity of renouncing96 his ambition. I hadn’t, of course, relied solely97 on my own judgment98 in deciding to advise him to drop literature. I had sent his stuff to various people — editors and critics — and they had always sent it back with the same chilling lack of comment. Really there was nothing on earth to say about it —
“I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters — but I’d like to know what act of gratuitous99 cruelty hasn’t been justified100 on that plea? I’ve always shrunk from usurping101 the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction. Besides, in the last issue, who was I to decide, even after a year’s trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?
“The more I looked at the part I’d resolved to play, the less I liked it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil’s is now . . . I’d been going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his future hung on my verdict — we’d tacitly agreed to that. The manuscript lay between us, on my table — a novel, his first novel, if you please! — and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at me with all his life in the look.
“I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his face and on the manuscript.
“‘The fact is, my dear Gilbert,’ I began —
“I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.
“‘Oh, look here, don’t take on so, my dear fellow! I’m not so awfully102 cut up as all that!’ His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety that drove the knife into my side.
“He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug103 about my duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so uneasily longed to prove my good faith and my immense desire to serve her. It really seemed like failing her twice to fail Gilbert —
“But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that encircle the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I might be letting myself in for if I didn’t tell the truth. I said to myself: ‘I shall have him for life’ — and I’d never yet seen any one, man or woman, whom I was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap that landed me straight in Gilbert’s arms.
“‘The thing’s all right, and you’re all wrong!’ I shouted up at him; and as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his incredulous clutch, I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is supposed to attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making people happy has its charms —
“Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation104 in some spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his emotions, and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began to wonder what their after-taste would be — so many of the finest don’t keep! Still, I wasn’t sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle, even if it did turn a trifle flat.
“After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of his eyes — his blissful eyes . . . Then I fell asleep, and when I woke the room was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk — and there were the other eyes . . .
“It was three years since I’d seen them, but I’d thought of them so often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now, with their red sneer105 on me, I knew that I had never really believed they would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them . . . As before, it was the insane irrelevance106 of their coming that made it so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I’d seen them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the searchings of their infernal glare; but at this particular moment I was really in what might have been called a state of grace; and I can’t tell you how the fact added to their horror . . .
“But it’s not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were worse. Worse by just so much as I’d learned of life in the interval107; by all the damnable implications my wider experience read into them. I saw now what I hadn’t seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous108 gradually, which had built up their baseness coral-wise, bit by bit, out of a series of small turpitudes slowly accumulated through the industrious109 years. Yes — it came to me that what made them so bad was that they’d grown bad so slowly . . .
“There they hung in the darkness, their swollen110 lids dropped across the little watery111 bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff112 of fat flesh making a muddy shadow underneath113 — and as their filmy stare moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they made it so clear that some day I should . . . Yes, that was the worst part of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time they came back to me . . .
“For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded me of vampires114 with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to claim their morsel115 of mine: since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply wouldn’t loosen their fangs116. The coincidence almost made me hate him, poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over it a good deal, but couldn’t find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his association with Alice Nowell. But then the eyes had let up on me the moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such spirits to avenge117 her. That set me thinking, and I began to wonder if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was insidious118, and I had to stiffen119 myself against it; but really, dear boy! he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons120. And so, after all, I never found out what they wanted . . . ”
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| n.处方，开药；指示，规定 | |
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oculist
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| n.眼科医生 | |
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afflicted
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| 使受痛苦，折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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delusion
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| n.谬见，欺骗，幻觉，迷惑 | |
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trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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boredom
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| n.厌烦，厌倦，乏味，无聊 | |
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uncommonly
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| adv. 稀罕(极，非常) | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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emblem
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| n.象征，标志；徽章 | |
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agitated
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arrears
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| n.到期未付之债，拖欠的款项；待做的工作 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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celebrities
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joint
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fatuity
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flustered
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| adj.慌张的；激动不安的v.使慌乱，使不安( fluster的过去式和过去分词) | |
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embroidery
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prospect
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ardent
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bent
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collaboration
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providence
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mattresses
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glimmer
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hurl
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immediate
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apparition
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drooped
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crooked
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pulpy
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| 果肉状的，多汁的，柔软的； 烂糊； 稀烂 | |
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31
scant
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| adj.不充分的，不足的；v.减缩，限制，忽略 | |
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32
bristle
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| v.（毛发）直立，气势汹汹，发怒；n.硬毛发 | |
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33
lashes
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| n.鞭挞( lash的名词复数 )；鞭子；突然猛烈的一击；急速挥动v.鞭打( lash的第三人称单数 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
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34
rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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35
gorge
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| n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃 | |
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36
astuteness
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| n.敏锐；精明；机敏 | |
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37
tinge
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| vt.(较淡)着色于，染色；使带有…气息；n.淡淡色彩，些微的气息 | |
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38
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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39
hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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40
projection
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| n.发射，计划，突出部分 | |
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41
morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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42
physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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43
amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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44
evoke
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| vt.唤起，引起，使人想起 | |
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45
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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46
wholesome
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| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
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47
exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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48
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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49
dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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50
loathed
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| v.憎恨，厌恶( loathe的过去式和过去分词 )；极不喜欢 | |
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51
majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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52
smear
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| v.涂抹；诽谤，玷污；n.污点；诽谤，污蔑 | |
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exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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54
exhaustion
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| n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述 | |
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55
insomnia
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| n.失眠，失眠症 | |
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56
cumulative
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| adj.累积的，渐增的 | |
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abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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58
disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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59
berth
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| n.卧铺，停泊地，锚位；v.使停泊 | |
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60
bliss
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| n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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64
zest
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| n.乐趣；滋味，风味；兴趣 | |
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nervously
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| adv.神情激动地，不安地 | |
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66
definitive
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| adj.确切的，权威性的；最后的，决定性的 | |
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67
pretext
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| n.借口，托词 | |
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68
piazza
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| n.广场；走廊 | |
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69
dabbling
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| v.涉猎( dabble的现在分词 )；涉足；浅尝；少量投资 | |
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70
forum
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| n.论坛，讨论会 | |
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71
obdurate
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| adj.固执的，顽固的 | |
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72
calligraphy
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| n.书法 | |
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73
respite
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| n.休息，中止，暂缓 | |
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74
pittance
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| n.微薄的薪水，少量 | |
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75
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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76
conclusive
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| adj.最后的，结论的；确凿的，消除怀疑的 | |
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77
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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78
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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79
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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80
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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81
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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82
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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83
slitting
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| n.纵裂（缝）v.切开，撕开( slit的现在分词 )；在…上开狭长口子 | |
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84
mimicry
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| n.（生物）拟态，模仿 | |
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85
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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86
ruse
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| n.诡计，计策；诡计 | |
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87
hypocrisy
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| n.伪善，虚伪 | |
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88
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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89
postpone
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| v.延期，推迟 | |
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90
absurdity
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| n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论 | |
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91
withholding
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| 扣缴税款 | |
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92
probation
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| n.缓刑(期)，(以观后效的)察看；试用(期) | |
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93
enchanting
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| a.讨人喜欢的 | |
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94
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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95
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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96
renouncing
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| v.声明放弃( renounce的现在分词 )；宣布放弃；宣布与…决裂；宣布摒弃 | |
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97
solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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98
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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99
gratuitous
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| adj.无偿的，免费的；无缘无故的，不必要的 | |
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100
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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101
usurping
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| 篡夺，霸占( usurp的现在分词 )； 盗用； 篡夺，篡权 | |
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102
awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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103
humbug
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| n.花招，谎话，欺骗 | |
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104
emancipation
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| n.（从束缚、支配下）解放 | |
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105
sneer
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| v.轻蔑；嘲笑；n.嘲笑，讥讽的言语 | |
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106
irrelevance
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| n.无关紧要；不相关；不相关的事物 | |
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107
interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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108
hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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109
industrious
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| adj.勤劳的，刻苦的，奋发的 | |
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110
swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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111
watery
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| adj.有水的，水汪汪的；湿的，湿润的 | |
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112
puff
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| n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气 | |
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113
underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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114
vampires
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| n.吸血鬼( vampire的名词复数 )；吸血蝠；高利贷者；（舞台上的）活板门 | |
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115
morsel
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| n.一口，一点点 | |
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116
fangs
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| n.（尤指狗和狼的）长而尖的牙( fang的名词复数 )；（蛇的）毒牙；罐座 | |
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117
avenge
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| v.为...复仇，为...报仇 | |
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118
insidious
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| adj.阴险的，隐匿的，暗中为害的，（疾病）不知不觉之间加剧 | |
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119
stiffen
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| v.(使)硬，(使)变挺，(使)变僵硬 | |
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120
demons
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| n.恶人( demon的名词复数 )；恶魔；精力过人的人；邪念 | |
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